ERA OF BIG PAINTINGS OF BIG EVENTS MADE ITS MARK IN CITY OF BIG SHOULDERS

Charles M. Madigan, Tribune Staff WriterCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The battlefield at Gettysburg is not the kind of place where anyone would expect to find an important piece of Chicago history, but there it hangs, like a gigantic, artistic, shower curtain spanning 360 degrees, inside a building called the Cyclorama Center.

It is Paul Dominique Philippoteaux's "Pickett's Charge," a vast, dramatic and, as it turns out, somewhat mysterious depiction of what many historians believe was a deciding moment in the Civil War.

The painting shows Confederate Gen. George Pickett's failed assault on union lines on July 3, 1863, often referred to as "The High Water Mark of the Confederacy." A day later, Robert E. Lee and his army were in retreat and heading south as quickly as they could go.

Katie Lawhon, National Park Service information specialist and, on this particular day, art buff, takes a visitor deep into the forbidden territory that is supposed to separate the painting from the masses of tourists who still come to see it.

It's the detail, and the sense that you can step right up and look at each individual brush stroke, that is immediately engaging. You want to reach out and touch the surface (even though that is forbidden and would probably draw a sharp slap from Lawhon.)

A forlorn dog howls at the blue sky, his master, either wounded and near death or already dead, is right there beside him. Soldiers in every style of uniform bleed and die on the battlefield. There are dead horses and ruined cannons and wagons everywhere.

The Park Service calls this "a colossal panoramic painting."

But "colossal" is almost an understatement, particularly given the painting's history.

There are photographs of the battlefield, of course, and line drawings and other paintings too. But there is nothing to send the message of the horror of warfare that approaches the statement created by this gigantic work.

Gen. John Gibbon, who was a combatant at Gettysburg, wrote the government years ago that he was all but swept away by the realism of the painting and the accuracy it captured in depicting 19th Century soldiers at war.

Lawhon is quick to note that the painting is not in good shape.

Hanging the 356-foot-long, 26-foot-high oil painting as though it actually were a shower curtain, attached at the top and free to float at the bottom, was a huge mistake. The relative humidity inside the building has never been right, so the big painting expands and contracts. When that happens, chips and flakes of paint fall off.

The building's roof leaks, too, and that has caused some damage. Then there is the mold and every other atmospheric enemy that attacks art -- not to mention the sheer weight of so much canvas just hanging there.

There are plans to restore the painting once again and move it to an appropriate new building, but the Park Service must wander across a delicate battlefield of its own to achieve that goal. At this point, the proposal is for a $43 million private-public partnership to build a new visitors center, but when that will happen is anyone's guess.

Ask Lawhon how this mammoth painting made its way to Gettysburg and you get a complicated answer. It has been here and it has been there. It has been copied and cut up and shipped and packed and moved many times over more than a century.

But if you want to know about its origins, the place to start looking is Chicago. Not modern Chicago, but the Chicago that grew just after the Great Fire, back when there were no movies, no radio and a whole city full of people looking for something to do.

Go back to about 1881.

The "Battle of Waterloo" cyclorama by Felix Philippoteaux, Paul's father, mentor and partner, had just toured the United States. Crowds were blown away by this 40-foot-long version of European war.

The speculation in historical circles is that the popularity of the work caught the eye of a Chicago businessman, Charles L. Willoughby, who sensed there was a lot of money to be made in this kind of art.

It was the beginning of what might be called "The Age of Cyclorama."

Big paintings of big events had become enormously popular everywhere. Chicago was home to two important ones, "The Chicago Fire" and "Niagara Falls," both housed in large round buildings downtown.

Although he was obviously a person of some influence, Charles L. Willoughby left few traces after he departed Chicago and moved to Plymouth, Mass. The Chicago Historical Society could find nothing of significance of Willoughby in its records, other than to note that he was successful, a businessman and somehow connected to some buildings that used to sit near the corner of Wabash Avenue and Hubbard Court downtown.

The Chicago Daily Tribune had only this to report on Jan. 9, 1919:

"C.L. Willoughby, formerly a merchant in Chicago, died yesterday in his house in Plymouth, Mass. He was for twenty years a member of the firm of Willoughby & Hill, proprietors of the old Boston Oyster House. He was the owner of valuable Chicago real estate."

Willoughby was 81 when he died, which means he was most likely in his prime in 1881 when, as a successful 43-year-old businessman, he decided to commission Paul Philippoteaux to complete a dramatic painting of the Battle of Gettysburg.

That, at least, is what the National Park Service reports.

It could be right or it could be perhaps a little bit wrong, but not way wrong.

An obscure advertising pamphlet, which sold for a nickel when the painting first went on display in 1884, offers another explanation. The pamphlet, in the archives of the Chicago Historical Society, says that Philippoteaux, encouraged by an art critic from New York, undertook the painting on his own and spent $40,000 to construct the building in which it was first displayed in downtown Chicago.

In that version of the story, Willoughby was the smart businessman who was impressed by the fact that Philippoteaux's Gettysburg painting was a huge success in Chicago.

Some 500,000 visitors saw it in its first year, with adults paying 50 cents each and children 25 cents for the chance to get a glimpse.

That legend has the Chicago businessman commissioning Philippoteaux to complete another cyclorama of Gettysburg, which Willoughby then sold in Boston for $300,000. The copy of the Chicago original was a huge success in Boston too.

Thus begins what might be called "the copying of the Gettysburg cyclorama," a process in which Philippoteaux and his assistants, apparently funded by Willoughby, eventually prepared copies for Philadelphia and New York City in 1885 and 1886.

In all, four versions are completed. All of them were bigger -- 400 feet by 50 feet -- than the one that hangs in Gettysburg today. It has been clipped and shaved during many restorations over the years.

Scott Hartwig, a supervisory historian at the Park Service in Gettysburg and an authority on the cyclorama, said Park Service historians have been all over the cyclorama story for years, and just can't buy the argument that Philippoteaux financed the art and building in Chicago himself.

First, why would he do that when he was in France?

Second, this kind of painting was not widely respected in the circles of French art. It was viewed as a commercial effort aimed at the masses. An artist would not undertake something so big, 400 feet long and 50 feet high, without some financial backing.

Third, it is much more likely that Willoughby, who knew there was money in entertaining the masses, paid for the painting and the building himself and was so enthused with the response that he ordered up a whole collection of copies for display on the East Coast.

Despite the acclaim, the Gettysburg paintings were not literally accurate. The haystacks, for example, are much more French style than American. The painting in Gettysburg shows soldiers being carried off the battlefield by horses with special wooden frames on their saddles, and that was a distinctly European way of hauling off the wounded.

Then, too, there is that bearded officer standing by a tree surveying the battlefield. That, as it turned out, was actually Philippoteaux. He didn't sign his paintings, he just put himself in there someplace.

The mystery enters the picture as the era of the cyclorama came to an end, probably around the turn of the century.

The Boston painting was displayed from Dec. 22, 1884, until 1891, when it was swapped for another cyclorama in Philadelphia, "The Crucifixion of Christ." When it returned to Boston a few years later, the Gettysburg painting was crated and stored in an empty lot behind a building on Tremont Street, where vandals and the elements did their work.

It was purchased in 1910 by Albert Hahne, a Newark businessman, and displayed in sections in his department store. It also was displayed in its entirety in New York, Baltimore and at the U.S. Pension Bureau in Washington, D.C.

It finally moved to Gettysburg in 1913 and was installed in a "temporary" building, cheaply constructed and unheated. And that is where it sat for 46 years. It was finally restored in 1959 and installed in its current home in time for the 100th anniversary of the battle.

The Chicago parent of the painting went its own way too. It disappeared for a while, was displayed at the 1933 Century of Progress and then showed up again in 1962, purchased by Charles King of Winston-Salem, N.C. He tried at one point to sell it to the city, but the locals were outraged by a suggestion that city officials should pay a wealthy man for a piece of art when there were more pressing social problems to be addressed.

At this stage, according to the Park Service, the original "Pickett's Charge" is the property of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. It is not on display and said to be in need of a lot of repairs.

No one knows what happened to the copy that Willoughby originally sent to Philadelphia. Hartwig holds out hope that it will pop up someday when someone opens some big crates at the back of a building someplace and has the inquisitiveness to find out just what this huge chunk of canvas contains.

The suspicion is that the New York painting was cut into pieces, framed and sold as individual works. Hartwig says a National Park Service employee actually saw two of the paintings for sale in a New York suburb some time ago.

"The cyclorama era ended when it was no longer practical to move such big paintings around and put them on display," Hartwig said.

There is no telling what happened to the big collections that moved all over the country more than a century ago.